curl vs yt-dlp
curl
curl.seyt-dlp
github.comSide by side
| Figure | curl | yt-dlp |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Command Line Tools | 8.4 (#7) | 8.1 (#11) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | curl is a command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. | yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. |
Plans
In their own words
yt-dlp
yt-dlp is a free command-line tool for downloading audio and video from online sources. It supports thousands of sites, including YouTube, Bilibili, Dailymotion, Facebook, Vimeo, TikTok and Twitch. Downloads can include playlists, subtitles or batches, with output options spanning video formats such as AVI, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4 and WebM, and audio formats such as AAC, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, Ogg, Opus and WAV. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. Standalone macOS executables require macOS 10.15 or later, while Windows binaries support Windows 8 or later; Linux binaries cover several system and processor variants. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the inactive youtube-dlc, and its public repository is licensed under the Unlicense. It supports CPython 3.10+ and PyPy 3.11+, while full YouTube support requires yt-dlp-ejs. Stable releases generally follow a mostly monthly schedule, and versions more than 90 days old display an update warning. Release checksums have SHA-512 and SHA-256 signature files with a GPG public key.